Indian ruling party BJP uses image of Singapore MRT in Narendra Modi poster

SINGAPORE: Several social media handles of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have recently circulated a promotional poster featuring Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The poster, which showcases an image of elevated metro-railway lines in the background, has sparked controversy after fact-checkers revealed that the depicted image is of Singapore’s MRT system, not an Indian rail system.

The poster, which carries text in Bengali, states: “If employment did not go up, how did metro-railway services reach various Indian cities? Congress talks; BJP works.” It claims that under the BJP regime, metro services have expanded to 20 cities from just five in 2014.

The BJP’s official X (formerly Twitter) account for West Bengal, @BJP4Bengal, shared the poster along with the same claim. Other official handles, including BJP Tripura (@BJP4Tripura) and an unverified page @BJPBarrackpore, also amplified the poster. Numerous Facebook pages such as ‘BJP 14-Badharghat Vidhansabha’, BJP Tripura, BJP West Bengal, and several others associated with BJP state and district units, further shared the image.

Indian media outlet Alt News conducted an investigation using Google reverse image search and found that the train image in the poster was originally taken by a photographer named Shawn and uploaded to the photo website Unsplash. The image, titled “white and red train on rail road during daytime,” is tagged with “Singapore” and “Jurong East.”

A detailed comparison between the BJP poster image and Shawn’s photograph reveals identical design patterns on the train body and several common elements, such as a signal post and a yellow track-marker labeled with the number 3. In the BJP poster, part of the signal post is obscured by Prime Minister Modi’s face.

Alt News contacted photographer Shawn Ang via Instagram, who confirmed that the image was indeed taken at Jurong East station in Singapore. This confirmation solidified that the metro-railway image used by the BJP was from Singapore, not India.

Further scrutiny revealed that the image in the BJP poster was a cropped version of Shawn’s larger portrait-sized photo. A detailed examination showed a Samsung store and the four railway tracks at Jurong East MRT station, as captured in Shawn’s original image. Google Maps corroborated these details, aligning the Samsung store, Jurong East MRT station, and the tracks.

Additionally, a 2020 report by Singapore’s national broadsheet featured a similar image, further validating that the metro railway tracks in the BJP poster were from Singapore. The image description in the report stated, “Commuters were told to add about 20 minutes to their train journeys between Choa Chu Kang MRT and Jurong East MRT stations.”

The metro railway image used in the BJP’s promotional poster, which aimed to highlight the expansion of metro services under its regime, is indeed of Singapore’s MRT system. This revelation has raised questions about the authenticity of the BJP’s promotional materials and the oversight in using accurate imagery to represent infrastructure developments in India.

TISG/